Carbonara-ish

The Husband and I went to a restaurant in Rome where we had a carbonara-y thing made with roast boar and peas, so I quite often make carbonara with frozen peas now to go some way to alleviating the guilt that I feel from eating a meal made up of 98% pasta with a squidge of protein and fat. And it's authentic-ish.

Pancetta or smoked bacon, about 150g. Or half a packet of the pancetta I buy. Couple of eggs.Some parmesan. About 100g, or as much as you like.A slug of white wine if there's any in the fridge. And a slug of cream if you've any knocking about. Pasta of some description, however much you need for however many you are. These amounts of bacon etc would feed 3-4.Frozen peas, a handful thereof.

Boil the kettle for your pasta, meanwhile grate your parmesan into a jug, crack in your eggs (and fling in your cream if you have any). Put in the pasta. You now have 8-12 mins to get everything else together. Easy.

Cook off your chopped pancetta or bacon in a deep frying pan until it picks up quite a bit of colour. Once it is nice and caramelly, chuck in your wine if you have it so that the alcohol boils off. The peas do in now as well, they only take a couple of minutes.

Your pasta should be ready, hopefully, so you can drain it quickly and put into the frying pan. I tend to keep back a bit of the pasta water in case the sauce needs a bit of loosening. Then put in the cheese and egg mixture, stirring it well. The heat of the pasta cooks the egg in the sauce, but as it happens I always use very fresh lion-marked eggs so I reckon we're alright. If it gets a bit tight just throw in a couple of spoonfuls of pasta water.

Anyway, we like this a lot and as long as we stick to penne or fusilli rather than the more traditional spaghetti then Babybear can eat it until the cows (or indeed boar) come home.

This entry was posted
on Thursday, December 28th, 2006 at 1:55 am and is filed under Recipes.
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